Another Fine Mess

I've been dipping into Saul Austerlitz's new book ANOTHER FINE MESS: A HISTORY OF AMERICAN FILM COMEDY. It isn't really a history in the sense of illuminating the underlying trends of film comedy. It's more a chronological appreciation of the great comedy filmmakers, from Buster Keaton to Judd Apatow. I'm enjoying it because I haven't seen all the comedies of Buster Keaton, and the book goes a long way to filling in the blanks. Austerlitz certainly has seen a lot of movies, and he gives you a good sense of them. Worth the visit, if not the detour.

Gone To Soldiers

We had a lovely chat with a Quebecois producer who's interested in our military families drama GONE TO SOLDIERS. Trying to explain the title, I went looking up "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" which I used to sing at summer camp. I discovered that, first of all, Joan Baez doesn't sing "Gone to soldiers every one," she sings "They're all in uniform." But more importantly, I found that that Pete Seegar only wrote the first three verses of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone." Joe Hickerson wrote the last two, which bring it round and make it circular. And that's what made it into a classic that chokes me up every time I hear or play it.

It's the simplest of songs. But it's not the harsh lyrics that get you. It's the soft ones. It's not the overloaded lyric, "Where have all the soldiers gone? / Gone to graveyards every one." It's the next verse, "Where have all the graveyards gone? / Gone to flowers every one," that makes you realize how it's all going round and round and round, and when will they ever learn?

Bless you, Joe Hickerson.

Sometimes it's not the first creator. Solomon Linda came up with a great riff for "Mbube," the lion song, and had a small hit in Africa. Pete Seeger (him again) turned it into "Wimowe" and had another hit. But it's not until the songwriters George David Weiss, Luigi Creatore and Hugo Peretti added the simple but somehow haunting lyrics, that the song caught fire and became a classic: "In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight. In the jungle, the quiet jungle, the lion sleeps tonight."

Not much in the way of lyrics, but somehow they are perfect, and they make me choke up when I hear them. (It is good that the lion is sleeping. No one will come to any harm.)

Writers, particularly writers unions, have a prejudice that the first writer should take the screenplay all the way. And some screenplays are perfect as written (BASIC INSTINCT and UNFORGIVEN were shot as written).

But sometimes you need a few people to add all the heart and soul that's needed to take it where it needs to go.

Netflix.ca

It's been a long time coming, but Netflix finally launched a Canadian service. They don't seem to be mailing DVDs out. They're focusing on video on demand: all you can eat for $8 a month, downloaded to your videogame console.

Need I say that could potentially rock the world of television? You have to watch Hulu on your computer screen, which is fine for college students but not so great for families. But if I can watch my TV on demand -- why the hell do I need to pay $80 a month for cable? Plus $25 a month for Zip.ca to mail me DVD's?

As a consumer -- yay! As a content creator -- yikes!

Fools Rush In

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A friend of mine posted the above on Facebook, and I thought it was interesting. I was in a meeting a few weeks ago with a production executive friend of mine, talking about a serial drama I was pitching. Canadian networks are notorious for not wanting serial dramas, and I knew that -- this was just something I felt was too close to my muse not to pitch anyway. She informed me that US networks are now even more chary of serial dramas than Canadian ones. They don't want DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES. They don't want LOST, to name two hit series.

(Needless to say, they're not looking for MAD MEN, either, which in spite of its critical success gets tiny numbers on a cable channel.)

This is depressing for those of us who love to write serial dramas. But you see the danger in mounting a serial drama. Most new TV series get cancelled. So as a viewer, if you have to choose between a new episodic drama and a new serial drama, why not choose the episodic one? At least you'll get an hour of satisfying mac'n'cheese television. If you give your heart to a serial drama and it's dumped after six episodes, there's six hours of your life gone, or so it feels.

I tend to suspect that part of the problem is that a lot of serial dramas are so watered down by network execs wary of mythology and complex story lines. If you're going to mount a serial drama, you can't try too hard to make it episodic. You're going after the audience that's willing to give their heart to some characters and their arcs. You have to give them the serial goodies. GOSSIP GIRL is all nothing but soap opera, and it seems to do okay.

It does seem to me that network television is driving itself into a rut. CBS doesn't want to hear any pitches that don't include a cop solving crimes, or so I'm told. You'd think in a 500 channel universe there'd be more room for story telling, not less; and story telling, after all, is one of the cheapest special effects you can buy. But that's not where the networks live these days.

I guess that's why, while I am pitching a bunch of episodic shows this year, all my current go projects seem to be features...

Movie Recommendations

I came home from the Toronto International Film Festival with the most amazing cough, which has hammered me for a whole week.

But that's not why I didn't see any films. I go to festivals like TIFF to see people in the biz. I rarely catch films at festivals, unless someone I know made one. You see films at festivals to find out what's new and who's hot; to see films with fellow fanatics; and to see pokey offbeat gems from strange places that may not get distribution. If you just want to see a film you'll like, your odds are better waiting for the reviews to come in. And almost everything gets at least a DVD release.

But how do you wade through the thousands of films that get released on DVD every year?

Lifehacker recommends five websites. Netflix you surely know about: it's the DVD rental service (and now Video on Demand service) that puts your own movie ratings into a complicated algorithm that spits out new recommendations. They offered a million dollar prize for the best improvement to their algorithm. Darn them for not serving Canada; I have to make do with Zip.ca, which has lots of movies but no special fancy recommendation heuristc.

I didn't know about the other systems: Jinni, Movielens and Criticker, which all let you put in recommendations; plus RottenTomatoes, which just gives you a wad of movie reviews. Criticker sounds much like Netflix:

Criticker uses an algorithm called The Probable Score Indicator to pick movies for you. They index the top 1000 users with the most similar tastes to yours out of the millions of Criticker accounts and ratings, then use that to compute the probability of a match. When you browse movies, the PSI score is displayed beside the movie listing. You're not just told that you'd like a movie, you're shown that it's 95% probably that you'd like it.

MovieLens sounds more interesting:

Movielens includes an interesting search feature known as Movie Tuner. Using Movie Tuner you can tweak the search results to find, for example, a movie like Pulp Fiction but with more action and more non-linear movement—or any other number of factors related to the movie.

And Jinni has some bells and whistles:

Unlike many other movie recommendation services, you can also explore movies by mood, plot, genre, time period, place, audience (e.g., kid-friendly, "girl's night out", and more), and by buzz surrounding the movie (such as controversy, critical praise, popularity, award winning, cult status, and more).

Has anyone used these sites, and how do they stack up?

Ghosts in the Machine

Q. I imagine myself writing a screenplay that turns out to be oppressively overwritten but a story has been kicking around inside of me since the summer of 90. [Describes story elements.] There are some things that intertwine the two stories but- I lack the skill to do it myself.

How does one negotiate with a ghost writer or even find one worth negotiating with?

The term ghost writer describes someone who writes a book that someone else (richer or more famous) takes credit for. The idea is that people will buy the book -- usually an autobiography but sometimes a science fiction novel -- because of whose name is on the cover. The ghost writer is someone who needs the money and doesn't care about the glory.

These days there is so little shame for celebrities in hiring a ghost that the ghost writer often does get an "as told to Casper McGhostwriter" or "with C. McG" or similar credit, which means they're the person who came to the house and listened while Sarah Palin soliloquized.

The Writers Guilds of America and Canada both ban ghost writing. If a writer writes a screenplay, they should get their name on the movie or TV show. In the bad old days before the WGA, producers, directors, actors, and studio executives' nieces regularly grabbed credit from writers. The WGA came into existence as much to give writers the credit they deserve as to set minimum payments for writing services.

If you have a story kicking around your head that you can't write, then you can still be a producer. You can hire a writer, tell them your story, and guide them as they shape your story into your movie. Because you paid for the script, you own it. You can rewrite it yourself, or hire the same writer again, or hire someone else to refashion it. It's still your project, and you can sell it to a production company or studio with the requirement that you get an Executive Producer credit on the movie. You get all the creative involvement you can handle, but you give credit where it is due.

Some of the top creative producers don't write. Darryl Zanuck didn't write. Irving Thalberg didn't write. Joel Silver doesn't write.

You can also hire someone to co-write with you, although not every writer will agree to co-write when they're doing the heavy lifting.

If you don't have the money to pay scale, you can call UCLA or NYU or another film school, and ask a screenwriting teacher to hook you up with a talented student who hasn't yet joined a Guild. Generally good writers don't get very far before they join a Guild, but a few people elect to stay in the non-union side of the industry. As a WGC delegate myself, I'm not going to hook you up with these poor benighted souls, but you can find'em if you look.

London Screenwriting Competition

The London Screenwriters’ Festival have teamed up with Circalit to offer screenwriters a chance to get representation. Screenwriters are encouraged to enter the free competition at www.circalit.com. The winning writer will meet with a top London agent, get £100 and free tickets to the London Screenwriters’ Festival! The competition will be judged by the executive team at the London Screenwriters’ Festival and is free to enter. The deadline for submissions is October 15th.

Normally I don't promote screenwriting competitions, because they're expensive lotteries. But at least this one is a free lottery.

Does anyone know anything about Circalit?

Snookie v. Sookie

Q. I've written all my specs for U.S. shows primarily because it's easy to find sample scripts on the web, but I would really like to try a Canadian spec next. Any idea where I can get my hands on scripts for Canadian T.V. shows that are currently on the air? Particularly Rookie Blue?

In general it's not a good idea to spec shows in their first season. They are particularly likely to get cancelled (though as GH points out below, ROOKIE BLUE has been renewed). They also may still be finding their legs, and the tone may change between the shows you've seen and the time your spec is polished.

I'm also not sure how many Canadian showrunners and producers watch Canadian TV shows, even the ones that also air in the US. I hear a lot of talk about MAD MEN. Lots of people watch FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS. Everyone seems to be a big fan of THE WIRE and BREAKING BAD. But I don't know how many employers could tell whether you'd written a great ROOKIE BLUE script or a so-so one. If they do, they don't seem to mention it.

It's a peculiar thing, the big gap between what the industry watches and what the average guy watches. Most TV is mac'n'cheese TV like LAW & ORDER. You know more or less exactly what's going to happen. You know what the characters are going to do. Most members of the audience seem to want that. They're coming home from a hard day at work and they want to relax. They want the bad guys to wear a black hat and the law man to wear a white hat.

People in the biz want TV to challenge them. They want complex story telling. They want characters that are good and bad. They're open to experimentation in narrative.

If I had to guess the most popular show in the TV industry right now, based on, say, Facebook posts, I would guess it's MAD MEN. And Christina Hendricks is on every magazine cover. In real life, MAD MEN is a critically acclaimed cable show with a pretty small audience. In real life, Snookie kicks Joan's ass.

For scripts, you can contact the production office and see if they're willing to help a writer out. Or try tracking down some of the writers on the show. They may have a strict policy about letting scripts out, they may not.